US voters head to the elections on November 5, and the campaigns of challenger Kamala Harris and Trump have both claimed to have been the victim of cyberattacks in recent weeks.
US security services said on Monday that Iran was responsible for a recent breach that targeted Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, charging Tehran of trying to sway the 2024 election.
The Trump campaign’s earlier this month assertion that it had been targeted, perhaps by Iran, was verified by a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns,” the agencies stated.
“This includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign, which the (intelligence community) attributes to Iran,” they stated.
Election day in the United States is November 5, and the campaigns of Donald Trump and his opponent Kamala Harris have both reported being the victim of cyberattacks in the past several weeks. US-based IT firms have also reported seeing these kinds of assaults.
Iran had targeted specific individuals in both political campaigns using social engineering and other techniques, and the US intelligence community was “confident” that these efforts were “intended to influence the US election process,” according to a statement released on Monday.
On August 10, the Trump campaign said that it had been compromised, accusing “foreign sources” of disseminating J.D. Vance’s dossier and internal emails.
In a statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said that the records were unlawfully obtained from foreign sources hostile to the country to interfere with the 2024 election and cause turmoil across the Democratic process.
The campaign of Trump suggested that Iran was responsible for the action after Politico revealed that it had obtained emails including the campaign materials from an unidentified source.
Harris campaign targeted
A Microsoft report this week, which Cheung referenced, said that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.”
Politico obtained papers that included research on screening Vance, Trump’s choice for vice president.
A 2016 DNC email attack, which was attributed to Russian interference, revealed party internal correspondence, including information regarding presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Trump, the eventual election winner, came under fire for supporting the hack.
The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Harris announced on August 13 that it had also been the target of foreign hackers, but it did not specify which nation was thought to be responsible.
A Harris campaign staffer told AFP, “The FBI notified the legal and security teams in July that we were the target of a foreign actor influence operation.”
This month, Google said that the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns were being targeted by hackers with Iranian support.
According to a Google threat assessment, a hacking group called APT42 associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted prominent people and entities in Israel and the US, including public figures and political campaigns.
According to the report, Google’s security analysis department has observed that APT42 is still making fruitless efforts to breach the personal accounts of people connected to Biden, Harris, and Trump.
